Desire Paths

Design by planning vs design by doing. Desire paths are unplanned paths grown by the erosion of its use. They emerge as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route. Perhaps one day, all our roads will be desire paths.

On QI (“Quite Interesting”) they mentioned a lovely name that park-designers have for people who walk in parks and create such “desire lines”. They call them “Meanderthalls” (sounds like a combination of “meander” and “Neanderthals”).

As Chris already said, architect Christopher Alexander experimented with desire lines by first laying out buildings, then watching people wear desire lines between the buildings, then paving the lines in to formal paths. Kuniavsky cites “Alexander, C. (1975). The Oregon Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press” as the source.

jurrian

15/06/11 at 22:21

These have also been a topic of discussion in a Don Norman lecture a while back ( in the Designhuis, Eindhoven)

John Date

16/06/11 at 20:39

In fact, this is how CMU’s sidewalks were located: allowing the preferred paths to dictate the placement of sidewalks.

natinja

17/06/11 at 13:52

The desire path is what emerges when you put the ground of efficiency over the figure of leisure.